Brain Dump - Defiance

We are at war.

I stand with two firm feet planted shoulder-width apart, facing forward in a soldier's stance. Veins bulge around the ball in each ankle, my calves are hard and cylindrical, like the end of a baseball bat. Knees bent, thigh muscles coiled, buttocks clenched, my stomach is one solid slab of granite. Back muscles strain release from skin imprisonment, shoulder blades mimic small sheathed shields. My balled hands crushed air into solid mass, my tensed forearms hover just above the bend made between angled leg and unyielding hip. Elbows are tightened to the exact degree, biceps are screaming, shoulders thrust back, and neck corded like thick stalks of wheat tied into a single unbreaking bundle. Every muscle possible to move in the face tenaciously resists his neighbors; the jaw muscles jut the thing down and forward, while the ones moving the forehead take it back and up, cheek muscles clutching the bone raise in stark relief, the lines in my forehead subtly scribble my life story, and eyelids tightly blanket the orbs within. Nostrils flare, harvesting the rich smells surrounding: soil, pine, water, ozone.

Deep, deep, deep within my most spacious cavity, an enormous wave forms, it roils, seething in anger at captivity. Building, the beast bursts confinement, rolling forth like a great tsunami, sweeping aside the hard apple in my throat and threatening to burst the tunnel directing it. The beast explodes on entry with the world, charging every direction simultaneously like wildfire, desperate to consume, consume, consume.

This little beast lasts but a moment in one far greater.

Around me, the world churns and boils. An angry, smoky face in the sky cries billions upon billions of soldiers born of tears of anger. They beat and beat and beat against my skin with a deadened thumping, rapidly laying down their lives for a dark master above.

Keerash… BOOM! The Master's blinding, brilliant arm strikes a nearby tree, creating a new explosion, a storm of splinters and flaming sap caught within the greater, swept along in the great current surrounding the Eye of the Master.

Like sandpaper, smaller minions riding the wave scrape and make raw my face and arms, occasionally carrying sticks like tiny clubs to smash, leaves like undersized shields to crinkle and smash, fragments of stone like primal axes cut and make bleed. They slide across my skin, a continual wave of the same, the same, something different, the same, simple-minded soldiers with innovation by accident and desperation rather than design.

The world is in chaos around me as the old Master bellows and rages above, but I stand firm. Even as I stand in the Eye of Himself, made still by cold and fury that silences all infraction and nuisance with an icy fire, raising my arms made wet by the perspiration of my efforts and the life-blood of his loyal servants, challenging with all my being as I cast my fury back into the sky and demand control of the storm, screaming with a need that shakes my very frame. The Eye of the Master moves on, seeking an unwilling victim, but unafraid to said his closing remarks as a reverse of the first, brilliant arms crashing down, teardrop-shaped soldiers, and rushing minions, all disappearing into time and distance as he leaves behind a world deeply cleansed by his righteous presence.

Only now unable to stand, my knees buckle into wet soil, my head bows and throws droplets, back curves, and hands fall into lap, a figure of fervent supplication following a deeply religious experience.

I, man, am small and weak. You, Master, great and cleansing and terrible and unimaginably vast.

And I stood firm.